At Last! GridIron Flow Ships

CreativePro Staff

When I recapped the January 2008 Macworld Expo, I wrote, “The most intriguing demo I saw was at the Gridiron Software booth. While content management app Flow isn’t even in beta, its interface already beats the pants off of most other content managers I’ve used.”
Since then, Flow has interested many others, and no wonder. That tradition-breaking interface sprang from the mind of Mark Coleran, a visual designer responsible for the futuristic computer screens and interface effects in many films, including “The Island,” “Children of Men,” and “The Bourne Ultimatum.” (For more on Coleran, see “Going with the Flow: A Visual Designer Transitions from the Silver Screen to Your Computer Screen.”)
But Flow is more than just a pretty face. Creative professionals desperately need to track the hundreds — even thousands — of files we create, receive, and revise as part of our normal workflow. Other software programs have tried to do it, but none have succeeded. (I’m lookin’ at you, Adobe Version Cue.) We want to know what files touched which projects. We want to know where those files live and be able to easily grab them. And we don’t want to lose those files, ever. And we don’t want to be forced to change the way we work to have all these benefits.
Flow delivers all that and more, at least in my daily workflow. I haven’t yet tested the shipping version of Flow in an authentic production environment with multiple users. Workgroup support is one feature Gridiron added relatively late in Flow’s development.
Take a Look at Flow
The video below is from Gridiron, so naturally it presents Flow in a positive light. But in my experience, this is a realistic representation of the app, and it’s a quick way to understand what Flow does and how it works:

Availability and Pricing
A single-user license for GridIron Flow, which you can buy from GridIron’s Web site, is $299. A three-user license costs $399. At the moment, Flow is available only in English. Fully translated versions will be available shortly. Flow runs on Windows XP and Vista as well as Mac OS X 10.5.